Critical Review by Joanne Kaufman

SOURCE: "Novelist Kathryn Harrison's Memoir of Her Affair with Her Father," in Chicago Tribune Books, April 20, 1997, p. 2.

[In the following review of Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, Kaufman notes that "the reader wants, needs, what feels spontaneous; the reader gets something studied, carefully literary." She compares The Kiss to Harrison's other works and finds them similar, concluding that "perhaps The Kiss will serve as the means by which Harrison can finally exorcise her demons and begin to broaden the terrain of her fiction."]

There are lots of really swell ways for authors to market their works these days: Concoct an elaborately clumsy piece of fiction but swear on a stack of Publishers Weeklys that it's non-fiction (check out Sleepers by Lorenzo Carcaterra). Slap between covers what is essentially non-fiction, call it fiction and credit it to Anonymous (Joe Klein's Primary...